A New Life for iPulse

With Apple’s announcement of System Integrity Protection in El Capitan, I feared that end had come for our beloved iPulse app. This app for tracking system status was originally released in 2002 for use with Mac OS X 10.3. It was also my first Cocoa app and taught me a lot about how to do modern Mac programming.

Over the years, there have been many FREE updates that made iPulse work well with the latest changes in OS X. Thankfully, the engineers at Apple provided new APIs that allowed apps to query El Capitan while in the “rootless” mode. This also meant that code which hadn’t been touched in over a decade needed to be replaced. It was a lot of work, but I couldn’t stand the thought of a Mac without iPulse!

We also took this chance to modernize the user interface, including updating icons and graphics for the Retina display. We also paid close attention to resource usage so that iPulse 3 won’t affect battery life adversely. The app also comes with new built-in presets that let you customize the interface however you’d like:

iPulse 3 is available exclusively on the Mac App Store for only $10. The App Store built into OS X makes it easy to install and update iPulse wherever it’s needed.

With luck, iPulse will be keeping an eye on what your Mac is doing for another decade!